Primary eve

Most of the TV ads we've been getting here are playing the standard game of who loves 'Murica the most and fighting over the gas tax holiday. This is Indiana, after all, and it's an open primary, so now's the time for both candidates to put on their best Republican outfit.

There has been one ad here that's really making me furious, though. It's being run for Obama by an SEIU PAC, I believe, (I can't seem to find it online) and it features in big, fat letters across the screen "XX schools built...XX hospitals built...XX roads and bridges improved...IN IRAQ!" Yes, because what's really wrong with the war isn't that we're killing people, it's that we're building stuff for them. Sweet Jesus, we hate foreigners.

Of course, the other topic frequently invoked is the old "shipping jobs overseas" canard, which has been a hot topic in our sphere lately. I don't really have any major disagreements here with my E. asinus colleague on this one, though I'm sure he could run rings around me on the particulars. The American worker does need to get past his sense of entitlement (and a broader destruction of the exceptionalist religion helps), but nobody's going to take kindly to a severe reduction in their prosperity, and we have to find a way to deal with that.

Oh, how could I forget "our dependence on foreign oil." Why does the Cosmos hate America?

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I haven't got any good news to cheer you up. The only semi-reliable polls have been showing Clinton pulling out a solid lead in the past week (Zogby is now polling Girl Scouts only), and closing the gap inside double-digits in North Carolina. If that happens, the media narrative of Obama hemorrhaging votes will shift into overdrive, and denying it will become very difficult.

Here's what I can see happening; you can throw this scenario up against a wall to see if there's anything to it. I believe in Obama enough to think he sincerely doesn't want a bloodbath. At least, he's got much less taste for it than Clinton, who'll go down to the last inch to get power regardless of what gets blown up in the process. He'll get a nice, lucrative offer to be Clinton's veep and the newest toy mouthpiece for the neoliberals--politically, he's virtually there already--as well as the anointed Heir Apparent. Obama brings his supporters into the fold--they'll follow him anywhere--and we're all one big happy sellout family again.